


Midnight Pretenders

by hoesthetic



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Ambiguous Relationships, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Japan, M/M, Prostitution, Zainichi Koreans, yuten is very brief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-23 19:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15613701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoesthetic/pseuds/hoesthetic
Summary: “He looks at you… in a way,” Jaemin says softly. Ten looks both curious and bored. It draws him in more than anything else, which is almost a frightening realization as itself. Jaemin brushes it off and continues talking.“Like you’re… the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.”





	Midnight Pretenders

At one point, although Jaemin isn’t sure where the line goes, his life divides into two parts, or at least _he_ divides into two parts. Jaemin with him and Jaemin without him.

Without him, it’s a lot like this.

The evening sky is heavy above him, the end of summer still relatively warm, as Jaemin swings his legs in the air, like floating. Two bars of the railing are between his legs, pressing against his inner thighs uncomfortably and all in all, it’s uncomfortable in all ways—even his thighs barely fit between the bars. The fire escape consists of rattling stairs and levels for it to morph into zigzag. All of this considered, the force with how Jaemin is swinging his legs is riskier than one would expect, and he is quite sure if he would shake or twist, twirl or turn enthusiastically, the metal would crack and break, and fall from where it’s pressed against the apartment building.

With a cigarette resting between his middle and ring finger, the smoke rising into the air softly, Jaemin feels quite calm. The sounds of nightlife and traffic carry into his ears like a disoriented song, somewhere from below him, from the streets and alleyways. Where someone is falling in love, or out of it, and there Jaemin is, smoking alone at a fire escape, hiding from his drunk dad.

Or if he can even call it hiding. More like a small escape when dealing with his father just gives him a miserable headache and something like nausea, expect it’s in his chest and the walls keep closing in. Jaemin isn’t too sure what it means.

He flicks his thumb for the ash to fall off from the tip of his cigarette, keeping his gaze low to look at the street under him. If he fell, he’d end up into a big garbage can.

Jaemin startles when a loud noise of a window being opened interrupts the silence that was never there to begin with.

Then, with him, something like this.

Ten peeks his head out of the opened window. It’s placed on Jaemin’s left side, maybe a meter away from the fire escape.

“Jaemin-chan!” Ten exclaims happily, although his voice sounds a bit broken, choked. Jaemin lifts his hand and gives him a wave alongside of a grin. He pulls his legs from the spaces between the bars to stand up and wobble to the other side to lean against the railing and face Ten properly.

“Hi,” he speaks. Jaemin places his free palm on the light denim of his jeans to smooth it out from where it has creased uncomfortably from sitting.

“What brings you out tonight?” Ten asks as he lights a cigarette, looped in the corner of his mouth, elbows propped against his window sill, which is just a very thin stripe of wood. He looks messy, but he always does, Jaemin is quite convinced. He laughs into the midnight air.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Daddy dearest is miserable and drunk…” Jaemin trails off, voice very much like a singsong. Ten tilts his head, black tangled hair slightly moving with the motion. He opens his mouth, most likely to respond, but gets interrupted when arms snake around his middle. Jaemin isn’t startled by this change.

It almost gets lost in the breeze and sounds of night, but Jaemin thinks he can hear the man—Yuta, his name is, a regular or something—mumble into Ten’s hair that he’s going to go now. Jaemin watches this with fascination. Ten turns around in his arms, and it’s a bit funny how his state of undress clashes with Yuta’s expensive-looking button up and tie. He sees love in Yuta’s eyes when he looks at Ten with a lazy grin.

Or who is Jaemin to talk about love, when he has barely seen it himself anywhere, but he thinks that’s the name for the longing in his eyes. He wonders if Ten sees this too, but there’s a big chance he doesn’t, because the way he kisses the corner of Yuta’s mouth is half hearted and lazy, barely bothering to tilt his head up. The cigarette in his hand is burning out, and so is Jaemin’s. It’s entrancing.

Yuta notices him only now, and a brief look of panic flashes in his eyes before it turns into recognition and relief. He loosens his arms from around Ten’s naked torso and gives Jaemin a wave and a nod.

“Evening,” Jaemin says as a response and smiles at him. He has heard that his smile is bright enough to swoon girls off their feet but does it work with men too? Yuta focuses his attention back on Ten because that is how it works. Ten looks almost bored in his arms. He untangles his hold from around him completely quickly enough and Jaemin keeps watching as they exchange goodbyes, and weirdly enough it doesn’t feel like he is intruding anything.  

Yuta leaves as quickly as he came, and Jaemin doesn’t see him actually go because the second he is away from the window, he is away from his mind too. Ten looks like a doll illuminated by the warm light of his apartment after he has turned back around to face the view. There’s purple splotches on his neck and collarbones.

“Aren’t you cold?” Jaemin asks him, putting out the rest of his cigarette by stomping it against the metal and dropping it over the railing. It’s not chilly outside by any means, Jaemin doing very well in his jeans and washed out t-shirt, but he isn’t sure if Ten is even wearing pants. He makes a motion of disregard with his hand.

“It’s okay,” he says with a smile on his lips. Kitty cat… Jaemin looks at him and it reminds him of so many things. Maybe in another universe Ten could have been an entertainer of any other type than this, illuminated by the bright lights of a stage instead of a flickering light of his bedroom. Ten does look sated with his life a lot of the time but Jaemin can’t help but wonder.

The question from before is itching on his skin. Or the feeling of wonder rather than an articulated question, but he isn’t sure whether it’s appropriate for him to ask it or not.

“Does Yuta love you?” Jaemin asks it anyway. Ten’s mouth morphs into a small o, thin lips no longer curled into the feline smile. He seems to think about it for a while, bringing his cigarette to his lips.

“I hope not,” is the answer Ten settles for. Jaemin nods slowly, shifting on his feet.

“I think he does,” he tells, no matter that he didn’t ask for his opinion in the first place. Jaemin rarely cares about things like this. Ten sighs.

“Why?”

“He looks at you… in a way,” Jaemin says softly. Ten looks both curious and bored. It draws him in more than anything else, which is almost a frightening realization as itself. Jaemin brushes it off and continues talking.

“Like you’re… the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.”

“Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” A calm smile lingers on his lips as Ten asks this.

Jaemin looks at him, then, in silence. The silence isn’t there, it’s in him, maybe, but the world is awfully loud so it causes headaches. If he focuses, he is sure he can hear someone laugh and someone cry, and someone yells, it could as well be his dad. Someone honks their car, someone sings into a microphone. Somewhere, below them, but Jaemin is up in the air with only metal under his feet, and if Ten leans further out from the window, he could fall.

Jaemin looks at him in noise and destruction, then.

“Yeah,” he says, in ordinary understanding, “you’re beautiful.”

Ten’s face lights up, and well, it is very beautiful. Very much like the bright neon lights in advertisements and in clubs, vivid and memorable, printed behind Jaemin’s lids in a distinct way.

“Oh, thank you,” he laughs. Ten drops his cigarette without putting it out. His lips look swollen.

Maybe in another life, Jaemin could be a writer, or a photographer, or something that creates copies of beautiful things and makes them permanent and as close to forever as possible. It’s such a pity that others don’t get to see Ten in this light. He can’t even voice what it is that makes it all so very special.

“Do you think my dad’s passed out again?” Jaemin laughs.

“I hope not,” Ten says, before realizing that he said the same thing a second ago, compliments it with a laugh, and then, “it can’t be fun to drag him into bed.”

“It’s nasty, but I can’t leave him on the couch, or the floor, either. His back is bad already,” Jaemin shrugs his shoulders, “and well, he needs to work. You know.”

“Move in with me,” Ten suggests, “he keeps messing you up.”

Jaemin doesn’t respond anything for a second. It’s sad and he really, really doesn’t like it.

“He’s still my dad,” he says softly but doesn’t argue back. Ten sighs with a sympathetic looking nod.

“Family is important,” he agrees, although it sounds very half hearted again.

“I guess I gotta go check how he’s doing,” Jaemin mumbles.

“Wait, don’t go yet.”

Jaemin watches as Ten disappears from the window but complies and doesn’t leave yet, just waits for him to return. He lifts his hand and rubs his nape, dropping his arms after a second, just to move to fiddle with the hem of his t-shirt.

It doesn’t take long for him to return, this time with a shirt thrown on.

“Lean closer with your arm out,” Ten tells him and again, Jaemin does as he is told, pressing against the railing and reaching out with his hand, palm facing upwards. With his free hand, he holds onto the metal.

“Careful,” Ten warns him, before putting something in his hand. Jaemin closes his fingers around the paper quickly, tightly, and pulling his arm back when Ten nods him to do so. Jaemin takes a step back, scanning curiously what Ten had given him.

“Happy birthday,” he says brightly. Jaemin glances at him.

“There’s still a few days left?”

“Well, yeah, I couldn’t wait,” Ten smiles sheepishly. Something warm fills his chest as he looks back down to his hands. He turns the notebook around, the magazine underneath it shining in the dim light. It’s glossy and cool beneath his fingertips, contrast to the scratchy surface of the notebook’s cover.

“Good lord,” Jaemin mumbles, putting the notebook underneath his arm to flip through the magazine. Its colourful prints, bright pink and pastel green manage to make him grin in amazement. The tanned skin of the male models, shiny and wet-looking pictures. He closes it as quickly though, putting it under his arm with the notebook, which he assumes is empty.

“Thank you,” he says, looking at Ten again, “you didn’t have to.”

“Don’t try to be humble! I know you wanted ‘em,” Ten grins, “I couldn’t get you pens though.”

“It’s okay. Thank you, still,” Jaemin can’t stop the smile hurting his cheeks.

“Make a good use of it. Both of them,” Ten says, and if he would have blinked, he would have missed the cheeky wink.

“I’ll draw you,” Jaemin says instead. The truth is that he probably can’t do it, doesn’t know how to draw, not yet although he is planning to be able to do it. Even if some people—his dad—think it’s a waste of time or whatever.

“I’m honoured. I’ve always wanted to be a model,” Ten hums.

With him, Jaemin feels so stupidly alive.

“Go shower,” he tells him.

“I should. I’m dirty,” Ten could mean it in more ways than one but Jaemin doesn’t think about it any further. It feels inappropriate to. Something lingers, something… something is on the tip of his tongue, but Jaemin doesn’t know what it is. He thinks of Yuta and the longing in his eyes, and the love songs and sparkly clothes of pop idols. Somehow all of it connects to Ten. As it always does, weirdly enough.

“Well, do it and I’ll go deal with another dirty man,” Jaemin tilts his head with an ironic smile, shuddering from the idea of the stuffy smell his apartment must contain right now, just waiting for him.

“Good luck with it,” Ten sends him a kiss. Jaemin pretends to catch it with his free hand. He thinks he will treasure it somewhere.

“Thanks. Don’t drown in your shower,” Jaemin waves at him, but then, very quickly, Ten disappears from the window again with a grin on his lips, but this time he closes the glass behind him.

Without him, the sounds of sirens reach his ears alongside the midnight breeze. Jaemin clutches the notebook and magazine in his hold, and tells himself that the feeling of something missing is just serenity. Or maybe the resistance of having to go back inside and see things he would rather not. The night is very beautiful, despite all of this, and the longing in Jaemin’s eyes goes unnoticed by everyone. The wind, that ruffles his hair, is warm.

Beautiful things are so very hard to keep. At least Jaemin thrives on things rather messy and uncoordinated than peace and beauty, so he thinks he is going to be just fine. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> hope u liked this lil weird thing. comments & kudos are always appreciated! u__u


End file.
